The butt-sucking American media is now telling you people about how peaceful Iraq is now, how little children are laughing and dancing in the streets because George Bush has brought Real Peace and Democracy to their smashed country. And we learn that almost no GIs are getting offed these days because of the stunning success of the Great Surge. All crap, kids, all crap. We lost too many grunts so they don’t go out on patrol anymore. No patrols, no IEDs to tear their legs off and, best of all, kids, no more dead to read about on the net.

Oh yes, peace has come down upon us all. Sure it has. The Green Zone is still being mortared regularly, the few patrols that dare to patrol the streets are still being blown into fragments but you never hear about it.

Forbidden.

‘Victory’ is the key word here. Our troops have beaten the evil enemy! Bush has been proven right, kids! The surge has worked. Of course they won’t be bringing anyone home soon because they are needed as Permanent Party here to set up a huge forward base, like forward base Falcon that was wiped out.

We are here now for two reasons and two reasons only: To help guarantee a nice flow of oil to the States and to help our dear friends in Israel to fight their wars. No other reason at all. Think of all the glass eyes, metal legs and arms and homeless vets camping out in parks that have gone to pay for Israel’s security.

On the dismal subject of oil, most of the pumping stations and much of the pipelines have been blown up but we never talk about that

The Brits wised up and left Basra. We don’t talk about this. What coalition? A few Poles, some Germans, one or two Tongans, three Georgians and a dozen or so others are our Unified Coalition! What a huge joke! They don’t talk about this one anymore.

Opium is flowering all over Afghanistan and since the CIA gets a cut of the profits, nothing is done about it. The real enemy, the Taliban, is wandering around Pakistan unmolested while our nasty hand puppet , the President of Pakistan, is declaring martial law and giving everyone the finger and the bull whip.

They are scared here that the Taliban will do a coup and get some of the A-bombs Pakistan has. Drop them on India and Tel Aviv? Sure, why not? India and Israel have their own bombs so it will be ‘Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy’ in the highly radioactive Persian Gulf.

They busted some grunts last week, pasting Bush’s picture up on the target butts. Poor George looked like a Swiss cheese. Sacrilege!

And What Would Jesus Do?

Puke.”

Iraq: A Tale of One City, Now Two Beneath Rosy Assessments Bitter Truths

November 12, 2007

by Ali al-Fadhily

Inter Press Service

BAGHDAD - The separation of religious groups in the face of sectarian violence has brought some semblance of relative calm to Baghdad. But many Iraqis see this as the uncertain consequence of a divide and rule policy.

Claims are going the rounds that sectarian violence in Iraq has fallen, and that the U.S. military “surge” has succeeded in reducing attacks against civilians. Baghdad residents speak of the other side of the coin - that they live now in a largely divided city that has brought this uneasy calm.

“I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased and that everything is fine,” retired general Waleed al-Ubaidy told IPS in Baghdad. “But the truth is far more bitter. All that has happened is a dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq.”

And as with Baquba and other violence-hit areas of Iraq, he says a part of the story in Baghdad is that there is nobody left to tell it. “Most of the honest journalists have left.”

“Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and neighbourhoods,” Ahmad Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdad’s municipalities told IPS. “There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni Baghdad to start with. Then, each is divided into little town-like pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes.”

Many Baghdad residents say that the claims of reduced violence can be tested only when refugees go back home.

Many areas of Baghdad that were previously mixed are now totally Shia or totally Sunni. This follows the sectarian cleansing in mixed neighbourhoods by militias and death squads.

On the Russafa side of Tigris River, al-Adhamiya is now fully Sunni; the other areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely Sunni except for Shula, Hurriya and small strips of Aamil which are dominated by Shia militias.

“If the situation is good, why are five million Iraqis living in exile,” says 55- year-old Abu Mohammad who was evicted from Shula in West Baghdad to become a refugee in Amiriya, a few miles from his lost home.

“Americans and Iranians have succeeded in realising their old dream of dividing the Iraqi people into sects. That is the only success they can talk about.

Violence is no more hitting the headlines, but it clearly continues. Bodies of Iraqis killed after being tortured are still found in garbage dumps, although fewer than a few months ago.

“Iraqi and American officials should be ashamed of talking of ‘unidentified bodies’,” Haja Fadhila from the Ghazaliya area of western Baghdad told IPS. “These are the bodies of Iraqis who had families to support, and names to be proud of. But nobody talks about them, there is no media. It is as if it is all taking place on Mars.”

The Iraqi ministries for health and interior have said that they are finding on average five to ten “unidentified bodies” on the streets of Baghdad every day.

“Those Americans and their Iraqi collaborators in the Green Zone talk of five or ten bodies being found everyday as if they were talking of insects,” Thamir Aziz, a teacher in Adhamiya told IPS. “We know they are lying about the real number of martyrs, but even if it’s true, is it not a disaster that so many innocent Iraqis are found dead every day?”

Most people blame the Iraqi police for the sectarian assassinations, and the U.S. military for doing little to stop them.

“The Americans ask (Prime Minister Nouri al) Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations when they know very well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing,” Mahmood Farhan from the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group, told IPS.

A UN report released September 2005 held interior ministry forces responsible for an organised campaign of detentions, torture and killings. It said special police commando units accused of carrying out the killings were recruited from the Shia Badr and Mehdi militias.

Retired Col. James Steele, who served as advisor to Iraqi security forces under former U.S. ambassador John Negroponte, supervised the training of these forces.

Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisors group in El Salvador in 1984-86; Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighbouring Honduras 1981-85. Negroponte was accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights in 1994. The Commission reported the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers.

The violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the CIA, according to a CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras.

The CIA records document that “special intelligence units”, better known as “death squads”, comprised CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.

Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

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